Conversations As A Platform: Microsoft's Vision Of People, Bots And Digital Assistants

Conversations As A Platform: Microsoft’s Vision Of People, Bots And Digital Assistants

Among the many announcements here at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, the company spent a significant amount of time with a concept it called “conversation as platform,” which it believes will introduce human language and machine intelligence as the next computing interface. Cortana lies at the heart of this expansive initiative, but it will require artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the use of bots that can appear in your everyday computing experiences, especially where your conversations happen.To enable this, Microsoft is introducing a variety of tools, including the Microsoft Bot Framework and Skype Bot tools for developers, as well as Cognitive Services APIs. These are new additions to Microsoft’s Cortana Intelligence Suite, which is a big data and machine learning initiative built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Partially,…